Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide[1] was the systematic killing of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I.[2] The total number of resulting Armenian deaths is generally held to have been between 1 million and 1.5 million.[3][4][5][6][7]

It is widely acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides,[8][9][10] as scholars point to the organized manner in which the killings were carried out to eliminate the Armenians,[11] and it is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust.[12]

The word genocide[13] was first coined in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), a Polish-Jewish legal scholar, in order to describe these events which the Turkish government perpetrated against the Armenian people.[14][15]

The Germans were allies of the Turks in World War I and numerous German officers held important military assignments in the Ottoman Empire. Some among them condoned the Young Turk policy.[16]

Inspired by these events, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, while persuading his associates that a Jewish holocaust would be tolerated by the West, stated, "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"[17]

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↑"That this assembly of the Association of Genocide Scholars in its conference held in Montreal, June 11–3, 1997, reaffirms that the mass murder of Armenians in Turkey in 1915 is a case of genocide which conforms to the statutes of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. It further condemns the denial of the Armenian Genocide by the Turkish government and its official and unofficial agents and supporters", The International Association of Genocide Scholars, Affirmation, Armenian Genocide, http://www.armenian-genocide.org/Affirmation.69/current_category.5/affirmation_detail.html.